Final Analysis
Roger Hicks considers… ‘Seventies-style seating interior in a Shinkansen’, by Christian Mader
The Shinkansen or bullet train is such an iconic symbol of Japanese modernity that this picture came as quite a surprise to me. The polished wood, the worn plush, the satin chrome, the beige walls, the hanging antimacassars: it all has a curiously vintage look, smacking of the 1970s or even the 1950s.
On top of its surprise value, I love the textures. This led me to thinking about how I’d have tried to photograph it. My immediate thought was that it might be an excellent candidate for HDR, to make it even more like a rendered illustration from a brochure and less ‘straight’. Obviously, I couldn’t do that, but I could ‘fill’ the shadows in Adobe Photoshop. And guess what? My idea was nothing like as good as Christian Mader’s. There’s plenty of detail in the side panel nearest the camera, but it greatly weakens the picture if you can see it. The dark shadows, the chiaroscuro, add to the sobriety and sombreness of the picture. The interrelationship between technique and aesthetics is intriguing.
Alternative interpretation
The book from which this image is taken is fascinating, too: The Missing Link (Kehrer Verlag, E39.90). Obviously, when I got the press release, I looked at Mader’s photographs first. Then I read the accompanying text by Hansjörg Fröhlich. His interpretation of the meaning of the book was almost the exact opposite of mine. He emphasises the alienness of Japan, whereas I found the pictures show how similar we all are: not only how (as I have said before) ‘all sentient beings desire happiness and the causes of happiness’, but also how readily Mader could have taken similarly revealing pictures in many countries.
For all that Japan can expose in sudden cultural incongruities, almost by definition when we least expect them, I have always found I have a great deal in common with the few Japanese I have known well; and even when we are not on common ground, I can usually see why they think the way they do. In other words, although there is plenty that is unfamiliar in the book, such as a shrink-wrapped pig’s head in an Okinawa supermarket, there was nothing that was truly alien. At least, it was no more alien than the (non-shrink-wrapped) goat’s head I saw in a Bangladeshi-run shop at the end of the street when I lived in Bristol in the 1970s and 1980s.
This, for me, is the great value of both this picture and the book from which it is taken. They gently and thoughtfully challenge my preconceptions. I cannot therefore recommend either to anyone who does not like to think.